Let’s cut to the chase, WarHorse is stunning.
The touring production of Michael Morpurgo’s story, adapted for the stage by Nick Stafford, was packed out, despite the fact that this is the third visit this year by the show’s cast to the New Theatre Oxford.
And it’s the puppeteers from the Handspring Puppet Company who steal the show. From the opening scene, evoking the rural idyll of the Devon countryside, the audience is engaged in a willing suspension of disbelief.
The puppeteers operating the geese, horses and birds that flap, stomp and squark their way through the the scenes soon melt into the background and I found myself being drawn into their reality as they somehow breathed life into the inanimate puppets under their control. 
Warhorse takes us on a coming of age journey, following naive farm hand Albert and his beloved horse Joey from their simple farm life to the horror of the trenches in the First World War.
And through the clever use of understated animated projection and musical narration by accomplished folk singer Bob Fox the story is progressed in a way that never feels forced.
WarHorse manages the difficult task of making the audience engage emotionally with the broad tragedy of the First World War by reducing it to a single story - that of Albert and his horse - and it pulls this off with complete conviction. It takes a lot to get under the skin of a cynical old grump like me. But to make me shed an actual tear for a horse puppet, which I hurriedly wiped away, shows that this production was indeed an incredible piece of immersive physical theatre which demonstrated the power of art to transport its audience.
When you watch a great theatre production, there’s usually rapturous applause as soon as the curtain falls. But at the end of this show, the curtain fell in silence and there was a space of a full five seconds before the stunned audience came to their senses and began to roar their approval. Like I said… stunning. Warhorse runs until Saturday January 6th - for more information visit the New Theatre Oxford website
Ben Fitzgerald
